The invention generally relates to the field of cellular communications networks and more particularly to the one applying small cells.
The increasingly common use of terminals connected to a cellular network (for example smartphones, computers, etc.) has caused an increase in traffic so that the cellular networks are increasingly overloaded.
In order to overcome this problem, networks of small cells have been proposed and deployed.
It is specified that the term of small cell designates in the increasing size order: both an attocell, a photocell, a pico-cell or further a micro-cell.
A small cell comprises a small low power base station provided for giving limited radio coverage and dedicated to residential or corporate use. Small cells are often deployed inside buildings and are connected to the network of an operator via a high throughput internet connection and may support a limited number of simultaneous communications (voices or data), typically from two to eight simultaneous communications.
Thus, with small cells it is possible to improve the cell coverage as well as the capacity of the network of an operator in a given area.
A problem is that small cells are often deployed in a chaotic way, without any actual planning so that the level of interferences between neighboring cells increases (a communication in a cell may interfere with a communication in the neighboring cell).
Another problem is that such a deployment reduces the energy efficiency of the network since certain areas may be over equipped with small cells, which causes unnecessary consumption of energy, the small cells may be unnecessarily active.
Reference may be made to the document, Y. Chen, S. Zhang, and S. Xu, “Characterizing Energy Efficiency and Deployment efficiency Relations for Green Architecture Design”, Proc. IEEE ICC '10, Cape Town, South Africa, May 2010”, which has highlighted such problems.
Consequently, there exists a need for smart and dynamic activation of small cells for limiting the energy costs and guaranteeing at the same time a quality of service (QoS) for the users.